Share dynamic documents for dynamic lead numbers
Make it easy for prospects to share your company's message on services like Twitter. There's a jungle of customers waiting for you out there! (Photo: Luc Legay; flickr.com)
When it come to B2B marketing, you’re likely sharing PDF documents. It’s a convenient file format to both create and read. However, are your B2B PDF documents making the kind of impact on clients you’d like? Are you enjoying significant gains in lead generation from your white papers, E-books, case studies and best practice manuals? If you’re relying upon static PDFs without embedded sharing options, you’re handicapping yourself from the start.
Let prospects spread the word for you
The Marketing Profs Daily Fix suggests that merely E-mailing your B2B marketing PDF files is far from enough in this world of online social media. If you make it easy for prospects to share your documents via LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and the like, you’re giving your company a leg up. If the content is good, prospects will see the value. It’s simply a matter of getting it to them and making it easy for them to spread the good word for you.
It’s all about the buttons
E-mail and social media sharing buttons embedded in your B2B marketing PDFs lead the reader by the hand gently, making it easy for them to quickly share your message with others. The easier it is, the more likely they’ll do it. To go even further, why not make it even easier to share your message on Twitter? If your embedded sharing buttons are merely launching Twitter for the user, they aren’t pulling their weight. Your Twitter share buttons should pre-populate tweets for the reader. Then all they have to do is make edits to the tweet before sending, if necessary.
What should you pre-populate the tweet with?
The basics of your business, that’s what. Your shortened URL is vital. You want it to be short so the sharer doesn’t need to create their own. That way, you can track results through services like bit.ly and HootSuite. Hash tags are great to include as well because the tweet will go to not only their followers, but to people who are searching for those tags. How does reaching thousands more people that way sound? Better click-through will be on its way.
One note of warning: currently, the best way to embed sharing options in PDFs is through good old-fashioned hyperlinks, as JavaScript hasn’t been perfect for PDF use as yet. You’ll want to make sure your company’s message – URL and all – is included in that link. As each social media service handles this a little bit differently, you’ll have to tailor your message to each.
But how about the message itself?
Ah, there is an art to that. Good, concise tweets can catch the attention, get clicks and be retweeted. Be creative and give people a reason. Just try not to make it sound too much like canned sales copy.
Tracking down the results
Facebook and LinkedIn traffic is fairly easy to track via Web analytics – check out the referral sources for the landing page where your PDF document is hosted. On Twitter, more work is involved. Assuming you pre-populate tweets with your company’s shortened URL, refer to your URL shortening service. Tracking is commonly available, and it will show you how many people clicked on that shortened URL.
Discerning where they go on your site after they’ve clicked through on the tweet is tricky. Twitter clients generally don’t pass along the referrals came from Twitter, so they’re viewed as direct visits. While this makes it tough to gauge the marketing effectiveness of your embedded-share PDFs, there is a work-around. Tag the URLs before you make mini with them. If you like Google Analytics, use their URL Builder to add the tags to the URL. Then you can track click-through from whatever channel you like and see exactly how much traffic is coming from your B2B PDF document. Even if you don’t use Google Analytics, your analytics package probably handles tags.
Want to see a working copy?
Here’s one Marketing Profs Daily Fix put together. It’s an E-book on B2B E-mail marketing best practices. Samples are available free of charge of the need to register. According to them, not only has the use of embedding made this a more tweeted piece of marketing literature, but the sharing has been persistent. In other words, even after the glow of initial release subsided, people were still talking about that E-book and sharing it.
Embedding equals smart marketing
Content is king, but you want to give your business any advantage that you can. If making it easy for prospects to share your content means using embedding options, you know that it’s the right thing for your business. Without easy sharing, more man hours spreading the word are required, which costs you more time that could be spent on new marketing ventures. Embedding share options in your company’s B2B PDFs makes your content more visible and keeps people singing your praises – they’ll be happy to do it if it’s easy! This translates into your business capturing contact information, which is always valuable for business.
If you’d like help creating your B2B marketing PDFs or are unsure as to how to institute these embedding ideas, Adworkz is happy to help. Contact us today!
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Discussion of PDFs with Embedded Sharing | B2B Lead Generation